


I Beg for Invisible Fire

by Quinntessentially



Category: All Elite Wrestling, Professional Wrestling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional illiteracy, M/M, Touch Aversion, you could read this as platonic but why would you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-14
Updated: 2021-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-22 16:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30041709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quinntessentially/pseuds/Quinntessentially
Summary: Kenny slings an arm over Matt’s shoulders like it’s nothing, like he can’t tell how much the weight and pressure burns, like he can’t see how Matt feels his skin crawl where his hand brushes bare skin at Matt’s delt.
Relationships: Matt Jackson/Kenny Omega
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	I Beg for Invisible Fire

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from [Time-Lapse Video of Trans Woman Collapsing Inward Like a Dying Star](https://poets.org/poem/time-lapse-video-trans-woman-collapsing-inward-dying-star) by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza because i am just like that

Kenny slings an arm over Matt’s shoulders like it’s nothing, like he can’t tell how much the weight and pressure burns, like he can’t see how Matt feels his skin crawl where his hand brushes bare skin at Matt’s delt. The monitor cuts from a shot of the crowd back to the hard camera on the ring.

“Good luck on your match tonight,” Kenny says. “Just a couple hours ‘til you crush him.”

Matt’s face is a smile, in clinical terms, but Nick would see the ache around the edges. If Kenny sees it too, it doesn’t show. “I’ve been working hard.”

“Yeah,” says Kenny, and his eyes are far and his arm on Matt’s shoulders is loose. It’s worse, now, the insistent gentleness rubbing at him like sandpaper. Kenny won’t even look at him and Matt’s not trapped, exactly, but there’s the nagging feeling that if he left, Kenny would just forget about him. Matt’s used to pushing through the ache of his body for matches. If Kenny’s arm on him feels the same way then he can push through that too. It’s worth it for Kenny’s eyes on him, Kenny talking to him like he thinks about Matt sometimes.

“Got anything cool you’ve been working on?” Matt keeps his tone light. Sometimes Kenny’ll talk about wrestling when he can’t talk about anything else. Sometimes it reminds him of the things he’s trying to forget.

“Not really,” Kenny says. His arm is off Matt’s shoulders and it’s the exact same sensation Matt had gotten when he turned in the first draft of the book: relief, terror, the absence of something that isn’t quite pain but that he doesn’t know how to describe any other way. 

There’s nothing special in the air, just the tinny burble of the crowd through the monitors and his match up ahead. It’s the places always rubbed sore.

Kenny’s turning to leave and frustration bubbles in Matt’s throat. “How’s Mox doing?”

“Ask him yourself,” says Kenny, quiet and jabbing back.

He’s through the doorway while Matt’s watching. It’s the same song and dance and Matt can’t figure out what he’s supposed to do about it at all. Maybe it’s supposed to be like this, just a cycle and Matt never reaching out quite right.

*

“You and Kenny,” Nick says a couple weeks ago, the BTE official camera held loosely at his side. 

Matt presses one hand to the guardrail, looks around the empty stadium seating. The sun is beating down outside and inside it’s hollow. “Don’t — don’t say it like that.” 

“He’s hurting you,” says Nick.

Matt doesn’t bother hiding his flinch. “It’s fine.”

“I don’t think I could film a segment right now and have it be fine,” Nick says.

“I’m fine,” Matt says, sharp because he can’t help it. “We’re fine.”

“You should tell him,” Nick says, and there’s something sharp in his voice too. “I don’t — he hasn’t realized.”

Matt swallows back who knows how many years of hurt, spits out, “He’d stop touching me.”

The words echo through the stadium, swollen with things unsaid.

*

He’s gone out the ramp to the ring without Nick before, plenty of times, but his brain still winces at the missing details in his entrance announcement. The crowd screams when he comes out, screams when he poses, and the lingering malaise from Kenny whites out along with his brain. He loves the crowd and the crowd loves him, reaches for him, loves him when their hands brush and loves him when they don’t. 

Wrestling isn’t easy but tonight it flows, from the mat to the ropes to the floor and back again, and by the time he’s taking the pin he hardly even minds the gut punch of the loss. It was a good match and there’s something so refreshing about the bruises he can feel forming, the scrape down one calf from the ring post, the way he’s panting with adrenalin. 

He makes it back through the entrance tunnel, collapses on the first non-floor surface he can find. Mechanically runs through the stretches he can do sitting down, then heaves himself upright to make sure his hips’ll work right tomorrow. 

Medical, next. They want to check that he isn’t powering through something that’ll leave him gasping and broken tomorrow, and they want to press their fingers on his body to do it.

Nick’s being there helps. Not physically, sure, but through the knowledge that he can’t just duck out of it and take the consequences.

“It’s like three more minutes and she’s done,” Nick says. “You big baby.”

“I lost and you won’t even give me sympathy?” Matt snipes back. The doctor rotates his shoulder, her hands soft against his skin. Carefully, where Nick won’t see, Matt presses his thumbnail into the pad of his index finger. Grounding. His shoulder’s screaming, not the muscle but what’s on top, and the doctor can’t help that.

Nick types something on his phone, fake keyboard-click noises that do nothing to hide how Matt’s breathing in gulps. “Kenny’s coming over, by the way.”

Something in Matt goes missing, and then he can’t tolerate the hands on his skin, his brain just a pulsing current of _make it stop_. Maybe Nick sees it in his eyes, blank terror, or in the way he opens his mouth and nothing comes out because he never learned the words for this.

“Hey, can we cut the med check a little short?” Nick says. “Kenny wants to talk about some EVP stuff and we’re on a pretty tight schedule tonight.”

“You’re almost done,” the doctor says, but she’s backing off like maybe Matt’s telegraphing something. “I guess it’s fine. Remember to reach out if something hurts unexpectedly, or if there’s an injury you aren’t qualified to handle.”

“You got it,” Matt says, and walks next to Nick into the hallway outside. It feels safer having a wall at his back. “Thanks, by the way.”

“You and Kenny need to figure out whatever you’ve got going on.” Nick shoves  
Matt’s gear bag at him. “Call me when you’re done, okay?”

“I don’t know how to fix this,” Matt says. Stops. “There’s nothing to fix. We don’t — Kenny, I’m not on his list of priorities.”

“Kenny needs someone, and I don’t see why it can’t be you.”

“Because he doesn’t want it to be me.” Matt wishes he had the energy to explode. The best he can do is drop the words limply between them. “I’m not, you know, Kota.”

“You’ve stuck around longer than he has — look, I need to go. Talk to Kenny. Tell him what you want.”

*

Bars in Tokyo are a little too wild and Matt’s clumsy Japanese tends to slide even further when all the people he’s talking to are drunk.

“Why’d you even bring us here?” Matt asks, a careful few inches apart from Kenny.

Kenny shrugs, florid. “Chase’s having a good time.”

“You aren’t,” Matt says. It’s too late for delicacy.

“Ask anybody and they’ll tell you I am,” says Kenny. “Good as true.”

Some impulse grabs at Matt, says to change the look on Kenny’s face by any means possible. Kenny’s tongue darts out and the heartbeat flash before Matt leans back on instinct he wonders if — and the moment’s gone.

“Okay,” says Matt. They camp out in the booth as the moon rises. Matt tells himself he helped.

*

Medical must still be there, but by the time Kenny shows up Matt’s not sure that anyone else is.

Kenny’s looking at his phone, then just to the side of Matt, free hand gesturing absently as he walks up the hall. Matt half expects Kenny to walk straight on by, get to whoever’s occupying his attention so thoroughly, but he stops a scant foot or two away, waves his phone in front of Matt. “Nick texted me. He said you needed to talk to me?”

Matt laughs. Kenny doesn’t.

“He just seemed kind of worried,” Kenny chips out, and there’s a spark of mania in his eyes or maybe it’s panic. If Kenny looked at him he’d see the same panic reflected back, emotional overload and the circuit in Matt’s brain firing wrong. He won’t. It’s a perverse kind of safety net, Matt’s all-consuming invisibility. 

“Nick’s a worrywart,” Matt says, voice blank as snow.

Kenny looks around the hallway like a nervous tic, or maybe he’s just checking to see that no one’s coming. “You seem… tired.”

“I had a match,” Matt says, and he’s obfuscating on purpose but there’s anger starting to screech under his skin.

It’s startling when Kenny throws his hands up, blunt shock of sound where one hand collides with the wall. “Ow,” says Kenny, then, “You’re just so — “ he circles the air in Matt’s direction with one hand, pinches his fingers together “— like that, you know?”

Matt sighs, plays up how obnoxious it is. Tries to disguise the way his throat’s closing up. 

“You know?” Kenny repeats, more desperation this time. “You’re like… yeah.”

And then the world slows down as Kenny reaches out a hand to hold on to Matt’s shoulder. Whatever dam was keeping Matt sane or unbroken has well and truly flooded it as his hand reaches out and slaps Kenny’s wrist away and he dimly hears his own voice snap, “Don’t!”

“What?” says Kenny.

“Just don’t.” The anger’s leaking out of Matt if it was ever there in the first place. “Don’t touch me, okay? I can’t handle it.”

Kenny cocks his head and for a second he looks like a dog smacked with a newspaper, and then something in his face shifts into grim-set place and Matt remembers that Kenny’s also the Cleaner, that he’s had crowds bay for him to burn. “Loud and clear.”

“No,” says Matt, and he can feel the situation slipping from his grasp. The same dizzy adrenalin as slipping from the top-rope turnbuckle, the same sickening thud. Kenny’s walking away and Matt’s so powerless. He can’t superkick Kenny into looking at him, into loving him. Can’t make Kenny do anything. It’s just Matt and his horrible persistent heart.

He hefts his gearbag onto his shoulder from the floor, focuses on the way the strap digs into his shoulder and not on the distant rattle of a door swinging shut. Nick said to call him when he was done.

Matt’s feeling pretty done.

*

Kenny’s lying in bed and it’s a good thing Matt and Nick can get into his hotel room because he doesn’t look like he’s getting out any time soon.

“We got you soup,” Matt says with all the shaky confidence of a guy who got beat bad in a match two nights ago. It’s cheap ramen, but they tried.

“I miss him,” says Kenny. 

Neither of them have to ask who he means. Nick sits on the bed and Matt perches on the chair built for someone two inches shorter and wishes he could scratch at Kenny’s scalp without wanting to scratch his own skin off afterwards.

*

“I told him,” Matt opens with. 

Silence across the line, then Nick says, “And?” 

Matt wobbles his bag further up his shoulder, steadies his base and sets his jaw. “It went wrong.”

“Oh,” says Nick. 

“I told you so,” Matt says with all the petty anger and grand exhaustion nestled in his stomach. It’s leaking away into nausea and the sinking awareness that his body is going to stop functioning soon if he doesn’t get some sleep into it. He’s not twenty-four. He can’t keep throwing himself at brick walls and barricades and walk it off.

There’s silence over the line, then Nick says, “Do you want to play something? I brought my Switch.”

Matt’s voice is steady even if it’s damp at the edges. “Nah, I think I just want to be alone.”

He’s almost to the parking lot, streetlights brighter than the moon. “You do?” Nick asks, and there’s an edge of hurt to it that Matt wasn’t expecting at all.

“I should probably get used to it.” Matt replays the words in his head, winces. “Not — I didn’t mean it like that.”

Nick sighs down the line. “I know how you meant it.”

“I’m gonna put you on speakerphone,” Matt says. The rental car beeps as he unlocks it. “How’d you get to the hotel, anyway?”

“Caught a ride,” says Nick. “Seriously, you should come hang out.”

“Ugh.” The parking lot’s just cramped enough to take concentration to navigate. “I’m fine, you know.”

“’s not like you have anything to do in your room.”

Matt doesn’t — Matt’s had enough fighting for the night. It was a hard match. “I’ll bring a book or something over to your room. Not feeling up to gaming.”

“Sounds good,” Nick says. “Take care.”

“Don’t I always?” Turn signal, quick scan, turning onto the main road. Not too far to the hotel and Matt wishes he could sleep in his own bed tonight, at home, where he doesn’t mind that he can’t see the stars.

“Hah,” says Nick. “No.”

It’s an easy curve into the hotel, and then Matt’s hauling his gear into the elevator with a practiced hand. The mirrored inside shoves his own tired face back at him, and then he’s stepping out onto the third-floor carpet. His room is quiet inside, like solace. It itches at him. Matt dumps his luggage and hightails it to Nick’s room even though they both know from long experience that Nick can’t make it go away. Hard to lariat Matt out of his own skin.

When he opens the door, Nick looks burnt-out. “Hey.”

“I’m here,” Matt says nonsensically, but it makes Nick crack half a smile.

Matt wouldn’t say it out loud, but there’s something in the quiet togetherness that makes the day feel a little less raw, lets him loosen the muscles he barely realized were tense. They don’t talk, though, and Matt’s grateful for it. It’s easier stare at the book he brought than to — talk it out, or whatever. 

“You’re gonna kill me,” Nick says. Matt looks up at the little _text sent!_ whoosh from his phone, and Nick’s got guilt written plain on his face.

Matt looks back down at his book as though that’ll give him the ability to concentrate.“If you say so.”

*

Kenny’s crying and Matt’s shaking too badly to figure out what to do about it. There isn’t anything for him to say, no English or Japanese or whatever Spanish he remembers from high school to give Kenny what he wants, and then there’s Matt’s own body keeping him from being even a pale imitation.

“I hate him,” says Kenny. Matt’s not sure he means Kota but he doesn’t ask. “He’s so far away.”

Adam barges into the dressing room and the look on his face would be comical if Matt didn’t want him — “Out!”

“What the fuck are you doing to Kenny?” says Adam, and oh yeah, they’ve got a match tonight.

Matt doesn’t care. Gets up in Adam’s face like he’s a problem to be solved. “You aren’t helping.”

“Alright,” Adam says, hands up. “Doesn’t much look like you’re helping either, though.”

Kenny’s voice is hoarse, unbowed. “He’s helping.”

*

Kenny pushes his way into the hotel room. Matt’s gonna kill Nick — or he will later because Nick’s slipping out past Kenny. 

“Hey, Matt,” Kenny says, and there’s none of the wildness that Matt was expecting, just a curious vacancy, mirrored glass. 

It scratches at whatever scab Matt was forming over the wounds of the day. “Did Nick explain anything?”

“Yeah.” Kenny shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it and his eyes come back clearer, more expressive. “I just — don’t —“

“You can’t touch me,” Matt says. “No one can. Wrestling’s fine, I guess, or it’s meant to hurt. You aren’t.”

“How long?” There’s cartoonish betrayal on Kenny’s face.

Matt shrugs and there’s anger in it at Kenny, at himself, at the world. “Forever.”

Kenny’s voice rings out like judgement day. “You let me touch you.”

“I had to!” Matt almost-yells because he knows this story, he wrote this story himself. “I know you. I had to.”

“I was — I was hurting you for years.” There’s something haunted around Kenny’s eyes, now, something self-defeating.

Kenny’s going to leave, Matt can see it about to happen and he’s frantic with it. “It wasn’t that. It was fine. I swear.”

“Matt,” Kenny whispers, rough and exhausted. 

“You were going to leave me!” And Matt’s voice is too loud, he knows it’s too loud with how quiet Kenny’s gone, but Kenny isn’t listening so he has to be loud.

And Kenny’s moving forward now, caging him against the bed until Matt’s the back of his knees bump into the frame and something like animal fear is howling in his chest. There’s two inches between them and Matt’s so breathlessly grateful, breathless at how close Kenny is and Matt can’t breathe.

Matt’s half an inch from screaming in Kenny’s face and there’s muddy fear in his throat and then Kenny’s backing away. For a heartbeat everything about Matt seems so irrational, but then Kenny’s backing away further, making for the door. 

Before he thinks about it Matt’s reaching out like he can make Kenny stay. He can’t. They both know he can’t. Yellowy lights and a swirl of dust in the air like the slow frenzy between them.

Kenny stops.

Arm still outstretched, Matt creeps closer like Kenny will fly into the underbrush — two steps, then three. The breath before Kenny slams a one-winged angel down.

And then Matt’s hand is wrapping around Kenny’s wrist, hair under his dry skin, and it’s — it’s not good but it’s okay, it’s more than okay because there’s a change coming over Kenny’s face, a brightness like a candle flickering to life. Matt holds on tighter.

“You were going to leave me,” Matt says, plea and excuse in one.

“I wasn’t,” Kenny says with force behind it. He’s so still in Matt’s grasp. “I wouldn’t. Won’t.”

“Prove it,” Matt says.

He lets Kenny’s arm fall. The moment refuses to shatter, the air still clogging between them.

“You want me to prove it?” Kenny says. “Fine, then. I will.”

Matt watches, blank, as Kenny plonks himself on the couch. “Mind if I borrow your Switch?” he asks.

“It’s Nick’s,” Matt says on autopilot as though they’ve made a distinction between what’s whose since the mid two thousands. “What?”

“I’m not leaving,” Kenny says. He throws Matt’s book to him. There’s anger in his eyes and it puts air in Matt’s lungs. “Sit down.”

Matt picks his way over to the couch, sits on the other side. His calf still stings, his back a mess of awful blood-warmth as always, but as they sit in silence and wait for Nick to come back, Matt’s astonished at how easy it is to stay.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was posted for one reason and one reason only and that was as part of my ongoing adventures in emotionally damaging sin <3
> 
> anyway, hope you enjoyed! this one's choppier than i normally go for but then i tried to make it less choppy and it went "ha. no."


End file.
